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Season Six: Holiday Episode 23
97 Plays12 hours ago
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Transcript
Content Warning & Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:50
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:01:00
Speaker
So we get deeper and deeper into these episodes and I start to lose the numbers a little bit. I just know it's close to Christmas. And I know that it's probably the absolute worst idea to do some of these because some of these get really dark really fast. But it's for the theme.
Harrison Ford & 'Witness' Discussion
00:01:16
Speaker
It's for the theme. It is. It is for the theme. have to take it for the good and the bad. Right. you have a favorite movie actor? I don't.
00:01:23
Speaker
So I have one. I've always had the same person as like my favorite. i always I've always had like a list of like top 10 people. Is it Harrison Ford? Correct. Is it really? Yes. Yes. is harry yeah Okay. So I kind of like him too. I wouldn't say he's like my favorite actor, but he he's a dude, right? I mean, he he's definitely a genuine kind of old school actor. Yeah, yeah he just he became my favorite so long ago. And I bring him up because he was in this movie that I think it would turn 40 this year, as far as like release years.
00:02:00
Speaker
That it kind of ties back into what we're covering today. Not exactly. He was in this movie called Witness. Did you ever see Witness? I probably did, but I'm not a great ah movie rememberer.
00:02:11
Speaker
Okay. So Witness came out in 1985. It's a crime thriller movie. Harrison Ford plays a police detective who has to go and protect this Amish kid. Because the Amish kid was with his mom, I think. I don't remember the exact way that he gets there. But he's coming to Philadelphia And for whatever reason, he has seen, i think they were just attending a funeral. And they're like on the way home after having gone to visit maybe an aunt they've gone to see a family member. They end up in this train station and he witnesses a murder.
00:02:50
Speaker
So Harrison Ford plays a detective named Captain John Book, and he has to go in and like protect ah this child and his mom. It's a really cool story. It's a great movie. an Interesting effect on how people see the Amish.
00:03:08
Speaker
It's listed a lot of places, and some of them it's positive, some of them it's negative. ah But it's it's really about like you know contrasting cultures and like how the things that you see from the inside versus the outside of different cultures like look very different and it's all framed in like this murder mystery crime thrill not much of a mystery just a crime thriller it's it's a really cool movie it ties back into today's episode which we're still on hostage takings because it ties to a 2006 case out of and a place called bart township pennsylvania now before we talked about this story had you ever heard of it yeah i had heard of it i don't know why though i remember Parts of this happening in real time.
Bart Township Hostage Case Introduction
00:03:54
Speaker
news.
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, the news. Okay. It was one of those things that I think the way they qualified it, I want to say they... called it a school shooting, which technically it could be seen that way. it has some really ah bizarre parts to it. And i remember hearing or either hearing the transcripts read aloud or like kind of seeing how this all went down. um It doesn't
00:04:26
Speaker
last very long. There are hostages taken. there are a number of of hostages taken. And I know in 2024, there were still ramifications kind of ongoing ah from the situation. So I thought this one would be a good one um as we get closer to to Christmas to include, because i don't I couldn't figure out a reason we would ever use this in a different episode. I'm going to go ahead and say, I think personally, this is a hostage-taking story.
00:04:56
Speaker
And I know that's ah like a little different than people view it. But this, like I said, takes place in BART Township, Pennsylvania. The community-specific name is Nickel Mines.
00:05:07
Speaker
And so Nickel Mines is a tiny little... village I guess. Or i think when I looked it up, it they called it a hamlet. And it's located in BART Township, which is in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Nickel Mines & Amish Community
00:05:21
Speaker
And if you kind of go along the path there, it's a small, small area. One of the things that I pulled up indicated BART Township I think it had 3,200 people at the last census. Nickel mines is even smaller.
00:05:38
Speaker
It has a sizable Amish community, which is going to play into this. It gets its name from the fact that there was a deposit of sulfide ore, and the nickel mines were worked there, so they would get this amygdala. people find this interesting or not. They get this an ingredient out of it called millerite, which is a nickel sulfide mineral i'm called NIS. It's ah brassy in color. The mines were opened there during the early 18th century, and they thought that they were going to get copper out of this area, but they didn't. So they ended up giving up on the mines. But in 1849, a company called the Gap Mining Company
00:06:22
Speaker
They came back to work the mines for copper. They work it for a few years and they don't discover any copper where they thought they would, but they discovered the presence of nickel sometime in either 1852 1853. Along the way, they had misidentified some stuff, identifying it as iron sulfide. And a church is built here. It's an Episcopal church.
00:06:43
Speaker
So from the mid-1850s they keep working this, but it officially switches over around 1856, 1857 to be just nickel mines, and that's how they get their name. Gap mining worked these mines until about 1860. They weren't able to make money, even though they were getting this nickel sulfide out of there.
00:07:02
Speaker
They end up selling it to a man named Joseph Wharton. And he's a well-known American industrialist. And he did a lot with nickel and zinc mines. He actually created the first plant in the United States to produce zinc, which is a big deal, Z-I-N-C, kind of his claim to fame. So he buys nickel mine in 1862. And he pulls out 4.5 million pounds of nickel in 30 years. At the time, it was believed this was probably around 25, 30% of the world's production in the same years.
00:07:36
Speaker
And he refined all of this nickel up in Camden, New Jersey, and he made malleable nickel, which is nickel that you could shake. So he was influential in persuading the United States Mint or the U.S. Mint to issue the first five-cent nickel coins back in 1866.
00:07:53
Speaker
And this was all because he had nickel mines. That's an interesting business model,
Hostage Situation Details
00:07:59
Speaker
huh? Right, yeah. i mean, he pushed Ford on this. Sudbury, up in Ontario, Canada, 1893, was
00:08:09
Speaker
became a huge competition for the stickle mine and they basically closed and if you were to go there today from what i understand the mines don't exist anymore at all some areas there's mine shafts and things that sort of are reminders but in West Nickel Mines.
00:08:31
Speaker
There's nothing but farm, farmland. This is a huge Amish community. West Nickel Mine School, which is where today's story takes place in October of 2006, it was a one-room schoolhouse.
00:08:45
Speaker
And The community that had formed in nickel mines is known as the Old Order Amish. So the Old Order Amish are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships.
00:09:00
Speaker
Most of the people had either Swiss or Alsatian origins. And they maintain a degree of separation from sort of the surrounding communities.
00:09:12
Speaker
And they all have their their faith in common. There's allegedly a lot of rules there. um There's certain reality shows that have attempted to do cover some of the culture.
00:09:24
Speaker
It's interesting. Believe that Amish is a slur, but we don't recognize it as a slur. i think back when the Anabaptist leaders were sort of exiling some of their people, they referred to a certain group of them as the Amish.
00:09:42
Speaker
So that would be... a Long time ago like the 1700s. We don't recognize it as a slur today We recognize it as a description of the old order of Amish people. So what's happening here is on October 2nd 2006 so for us sitting here today, that's 19 years ago. There was sort of an incursion in this one-room schoolhouse, which I don't know how you invade a one-room schoolhouse, but It's not hard Right. We're here. you just You basically just open the door and whatever's in front of you, you you take it hostage.
00:10:16
Speaker
Well, right, but he had, in the way anyone takes hostage with weapons, right? Because you're basically saying, don't move or I'll shoot. Yeah, so this is an odd type of hostage taking. Compared to some of the other hostage taking, it has kind of a high count of people that are injured or killed.
00:10:35
Speaker
The perpetrator is a guy named Charles Carl Roberts who And his story, like on the surface is kind of boring, but underneath, if you read into it, there was something really weird going on in this guy's life.
00:10:49
Speaker
ah He was born back in December of 1973, December 7th, 1973. So this is October happening.
00:10:59
Speaker
he's not that old he's going to be thirty two when this is all happening According to the little bios you can find online, and a lot of those are coming out of the local papers up in Pennsylvania, he was a milk tank truck driver. And one of the things that he did along his route, so to speak, was to service several Amish farms in this area.
00:11:23
Speaker
And according to the different readings, he would regularly interact with some of of the families who would be the victims' families in this case. He had three children and a wife. He left four separate suicide notes behind on October 2nd, 2006, when he set off to do this.
00:11:41
Speaker
And according to a state police commissioner named Jeffrey B. Miller, he had been interviewing ah some of Charles Roberts' coworkers. He says that the coworkers had started to notice that something had happened earlier.
00:11:56
Speaker
to Charles Carl Roberts in the months immediately before the shooting. They would claim that he seemed to return to normal the week before the shooting, and Jeffrey Miller hypothesized that this was basically the clone before the storm, meaning he had decided, I'm going to go through with this thing I've been planning, this hostage taking and shooting.
00:12:16
Speaker
Now, what's wild about this is just in terms of timing. This is going to be just a couple of days after the Platte Canyon High School hostage crisis, which is out in Bailey, Colorado at Platte Canyon High School.
00:12:33
Speaker
That's September 27, 2006. There's a lot of weird similarities between these two hostage taking. I think we've kind of talked about Platte Canyon in time. i don't think we've ever told the whole story, but the idea there was a guy named Dwayne Roger Morrison, who was 53 years old. He took seven female students hostage and he sexually assaulted them. He released four of them.
00:13:04
Speaker
Police came and like blew open the classroom door with breaching charges and they got into a gunfight with him. And he ends up shooting one of the hostages named Emily Keyes in the head. in the head The other hostages, they escape.
00:13:21
Speaker
And according to the story they give us, Keyes passes away a little later, Emily Keyes does. And Dwayne Roger Morrison had committed suicide. Now, what's interesting about that happening so close in time to this as it's going to have a similar number of hostages.
00:13:42
Speaker
So, according to all the stories that we have, Charles Carl Roberts IV, he was, at the time, a resident of a little place called Georgetown, which is another part of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. It's actually another part of Bard Township, so it's this little... Like, it's like another borough, kind of. It's another really small place. The population that I was able to look up said that they had 1,300 people. And that's kind of gone up and down over the years. So his wife last sees him at 8.45 a.m. And they walk their children to a bus stop before she is going to be leaving.
00:14:21
Speaker
Now, she's not going to get home until little before 11 And she's going to find those notes that we were talking about. According to her recounting of everything, Charles Roberts calls her from the schoolhouse using his cell phone.
00:14:37
Speaker
And he has a really weird conversation with her. He tells her that 20 years ago, so he would have been around 12 years old, he had molested two young female relatives who were under the age of five.
00:14:52
Speaker
And he was having... trouble in present day when he's 32, he's been daydreaming about molesting those children again.
00:15:04
Speaker
This is according to stories that don't really have a lot of basis other than people talking. Now, in one of the notes that Charles leaves behind, he said the death of his daughter, who had died nine years earlier before this all happens, back in the 90s, she had died 20 minutes after his wife had given birth.
00:15:25
Speaker
And he he tells his family that that had changed him forever. He says, since her death he had been filled with so much hate toward himself and god and he stated that he had been having dreams for the past couple of years doing what he did twenty years ago And he is dreaming of doing those things again. This is according to the wife and according to Police Commissioner Miller. On October 4th of 2006, so two days later, the relatives mentioned in these notes who Charles Robert said he molested 20 years earlier, they tell police that that never happened.
00:16:00
Speaker
One of the weird things they find, I don't i don't know how we end up with these weird details. People just choose what they want to say about these crazy cases. It was KY Jelly is found in the schoolhouse among his belongings, suggesting maybe he was going to do something a little different that day.
00:16:18
Speaker
I grabbed an article about this part, and we'll come back to what's going on. This is ah out of cnn They publish it like within 24 hours of the hostage taking. So keep in mind,
00:16:32
Speaker
Sometimes when that happens, those hot takes are not as accurate as we may want them to be. But it says that you know Pennsylvania schoolhouse hostage taker Charles Roberts tells his wife that he had molested young relatives 20 years ago and he'd been dreaming about molesting children.
00:16:50
Speaker
Investigators talked to relatives, they analyzed suicide notes, and tried to determine what made Roberts barricade himself inside a tiny tiny Amish school. They theorize here, again, this is State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller, that Roberts may have targeted this tiny school for its girl students, and he lists off some of the things that they find. So they say that Roberts brought KY Jelly lubricant to the schoolhouse, but there's no evidence of any kind of assault.
00:17:17
Speaker
According to Miller, he said it's it's very possible he intended to victimize these children in many ways. He said that police had found a checklist in Robert's truck that seemed to match evidence and items that were recovered. The checklist included tape, eye bolts, a hose, bullets, guns, binoculars, earplugs, flashlights, wood, and candles. They indicated there were parts of these items checked off. In the school, they find this two byf four board of wood.
00:17:47
Speaker
that has 10 large eye bolts spaced about 10 inches apart, which is interesting because according to Miller, there were 10 victims there at that time.
Perpetrator's Strategy & Actions
00:17:59
Speaker
But, And Miller believes that Roberts became disorganized when police are arrived and that it threw him off that sudden his plans were ruined more quickly than he thought they would be.
00:18:12
Speaker
do you think that by eyeball, they're talking about like the eye side of a hook and eye? Yeah, like it's it's the eye side of a hook and eye. like So if you have a hook and eye, the hook would literally have a sharp piece or rounded piece that goes into an eyeball. So these eyeballs are probably to tie something to Right. like having a two by four with a bunch who have large eyeballs in it that you're going to tie people to makes yes zero sense to me without him, like telling me the context.
00:18:47
Speaker
of what he was doing, I don't understand. And not to mention like that checklist. yeah What a modpodge, right? Yeah. what was because What was going through his mind when he was making that list? Not to mention checking off some of the items. Like it's crazy. Well, and so, you know, we find out like he's had... kids and stuff. They mention even in this article, they bring up the the baby dying. mention that he was mad at God for how this baby, Elise is her name, had died just 20 minutes after being born prematurely over nine years ago.
00:19:19
Speaker
So they mention this part. And it says that in the phone call, he has told his wife, Marie, I'm not coming home. The police are here. So, you know, you say, what a modge podge.
00:19:31
Speaker
All of that stuff. It feels really juvenile. I don't know if he was suffering from some kind of cognitive development issues, but did you ever make a list like you were going to run away from home? No.
00:19:46
Speaker
I think back to when I was very young teenager and like, I didn't do the runaway thing, but what I did do was I would have these moments where i was like, I want to go on an adventure. Right.
00:20:01
Speaker
And I would put stuff in my backpack, my little old school backpack. I'd dump all the books out very dramatically, like put stuff in there and make a list of the stuff I needed. Those lists probably sounded like a version of this. I don't think I ever put guns on there, but, you know, maybe a Nerf gun or something or a Cap gun, thinking kind I knew what i was talking about.
00:20:20
Speaker
ah That list is is strange. So you've tape, eye bolts, a hose, bullets, guns, binoculars, earplugs, flashlights, wood, and candles. In a lot of ways, I mean, he's acting out.
00:20:33
Speaker
Oh, certainly, And that's typically what, um um I don't know if he was caught if he had a cognitive disadvantage, but that acting out is what kids throwing tantrums do. And I'm not sure why, i guess they were in the notes, but I'm not really sure what they're getting at here when they're like, oh, my baby died 20 minutes after being born nine years ago. And like, oh, I molested these two relative family members. no I mean, I guess they're just trying to, they're trying to pen why, right? Like why he did this. Except like he's kind of, I would say that he probably is suffering from a cognitive issue in that if the molestation never happened, but his brain had told him it had. Yeah.
00:21:18
Speaker
he'd been like fantasizing about it perhaps. Yeah. I don't know you what in the world is happening with Amir. Like I tried, i went back through and tried to figure out if somebody had gotten a good take on his mental health, but I don't see one in any of the available information. And honestly, in all seriousness, there is a lifetime movie about this case, but it's really not talked about in any serious way from the perspective of like what happened here.
00:21:47
Speaker
now According to the story, what Charles Roberts does is he backs a pickup truck up in front of this little Amish schoolhouse.
00:21:59
Speaker
Have you ever seen a one-room schoolhouse before? I have. that Not a modern one, but yes, I have. Yeah. So he backs up to the schoolhouse, and he this is at 1025 in the morning.
00:22:12
Speaker
So the way the story is told to us is the kids had just gone out for recess. Basically, they were trying to burn off the morning and and energy. They bring them back in, and he asked the teacher, who is a woman named Emma Mayzouk,
00:22:29
Speaker
And the students that she's bringing back into the schoolhouse, if they had seen a missing Clevis pen on the road. According to the folks that are involved in this, they said he was mumbling his words and he wasn't making eye contact.
00:22:44
Speaker
And they tell them they haven't seen this clevis pen. but So a clevis pen is like, it looks like a wishbone. And through the prongs of the wishbone, like there's usually a bolt that goes across.
00:22:56
Speaker
I have one on one of the trailers out here. was going to usually it attaches something yeah your vehicle. Yeah. So, you know, the kids say they haven't seen it, and the teacher kind of ushering me back inside.
00:23:11
Speaker
He goes back to his truck, and he gets a Springfield Armory XD 9mm handgun. This is not like... any kind of assault weapon or anything. It's just like a really standard, usually black or silver and black handgun. He uses it to start ordering people around. He orders the boys in the class to come and help him carry items from his truck into the classroom.
00:23:37
Speaker
Now, emmazoo Emma Zook, Emma Mazook and her mom, they they're in this classroom and mom has been visiting with Emma Mazook today. They take this opportunity to run off.
00:23:50
Speaker
They escape. They go to a nearby farm for help. And Roberts sees them leaving. And he orders one of the boys in this classroom to basically go and stop them. And he tells them if he doesn't stop them, that he's going to shoot everyone. So basically, they get away, I'm going to kill everyone.
00:24:11
Speaker
Which is one of the reasons this all sort of like goes south so fast. Because this is all happening within five minutes of getting here. The group that runs, specifically you know the teacher and her mom, they get to the farm. They ask a man named Amos Smoker, who...
00:24:31
Speaker
is at the farm to call 911. These boys are still carrying in lumber, a shotgun, there's a stun gun in the middle of all this, wires, chains, nails, hooks.
00:24:43
Speaker
There's a bag that they don't know what's inside of it and there's that wooden board we talked about that has all the eye hooks on it. The bag is later revealed to have a change of clothes, toilet paper, candles, and zip ties inside. And using some of these boards, Charles Roberts barricades the front door.
00:25:00
Speaker
And he starts ordering the girls to line up against the chalkboard. He does allow, in the in in the chaos here, he does allow a pregnant woman who's there and three parents who have very, very small children. They're described as infants.
00:25:15
Speaker
And all the boys that are in the room... to leave He tells him to get out. There is one girl, nine-year-old named Emma Fisher. She escapes from all of this, and her story pops up again in the Times London. And it it's an interesting article from a guy named Sam Knight that's published also in the aftermath of all of this.
00:25:38
Speaker
But basically, the idea of the article is that this was all like some crazy, awkward encounter. yeah I was looking for the title of it. i had it in here somewhere. It says the awkward encounter that began Amish school nightmare.
00:25:54
Speaker
Right. And so at first I was like, I can't believe the teacher left. Right. Right. Except what was she going to do? Like just stand there. And then it comes up, of course, it comes up because he's allowing them to leave. But there are other adults there.
00:26:11
Speaker
Right. Correct. And. It's all an interesting type of situation. And so far, i will and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but because it's an Amish schoolhouse, I'm assuming that these kids and adults and infants and everybody in this house, this schoolhouse that's supposed to be there, they're all from the Amish community? Yes. And the perp isn't.
00:26:37
Speaker
Well, he's... He's not there as part of the youngest community, but he is familiar with this area. His job takes him here all the time. Right, but he's... You're right. There's still a distinct separation. Okay. and And so, anyway, i initially was like, I can't believe the teacher left, like, but...
00:26:54
Speaker
Then I was like, oh, there were other adults there. And this is very chaotic, right? All of it's chaotic. And now we have all the parents with the small children leaving. We have the pregnant lady leaving. And then we have all the boys leaving. So that leaves like basic, oh, and then the nine-year-old girl, right? Correct. And so we've got all the girls there, basically, lined up at the chalkboard. Correct.
00:27:19
Speaker
And that bears a striking similarity to the other case you mentioned earlier. Correct. Right. That's why I brought up Dwayne Morrison, because that happened so close in time to this. That was a much longer hostage taking than this is ultimately going to be.
00:27:32
Speaker
But, you know, this is one of those things that when you look at it, i don't think, I hate to say it this way, but I don't think he knew what he was doing at all. Like, I don't think there was any part of this where Charles Roberts made any sense of how he was going to actually achieve whatever he thought he was hoping to achieve? I'm not even sure there was a plan here. I kind of agree with you on that. The lack of a plan is like its own sort of odd problem. So we have Amos Smoker. That's the guy at the farm. He is recounted in a couple of different ways. I don't know exactly what happened here, but I'm going to give you some of
00:28:15
Speaker
what said There's an old article from Police One that you can find on newspapers.com. It's called Revisiting the Schoolhouse Massacre. and There's a couple of CNN articles from the same time frame.
00:28:26
Speaker
Basically, it says he calls 911, and that call is recorded at 1036 in the morning. Now, the police have a pretty interesting take on him. They say that an Amish adult male from the farm with two large dogs took the opportunity to approach the windowless backlog back wall of the school. He was hoping for an opportunity to help the little girls, and he creeps around one side of the structure, and he positions himself. as an observer next to a side window. He observes the first police patrol vehicle approaching the scene, was not slowing down to stop.
00:28:58
Speaker
He runs out into the roadway to wave down the trooper who does a yeah U-turn in parks. And this would be the last successful attempt at any kind of unnoticed move upon the building, meaning the rest are are going to be weird. So they had the first trooper on the scene at 1042. So Smoker's call is recorded at 1036. Police are there by 1042. That's a pretty good response, Todd.
00:29:20
Speaker
So you're basically six minutes after the 911 call. And the police try to communicate with Roberts over the loudspeakers on the car. So, you know, it's kind of a come out of the schoolhouse type thing over the the speakers. They ask him if he will throw out his weapons and exit the schoolhouse.
00:29:36
Speaker
He declines their request. He tells them they need to go away. So after about 18, 20 minutes, right around 11 o'clock, so depending on like how you want to look at it, there's a large crowd of people that are
Hostage Crisis Escalation
00:29:51
Speaker
coming up on this. Police officers are there. EMTs have come over. Residents of the village have come out. And they are all standing outside of the schoolhouse. And they have created a nearby ambulance staging area. Because at first, they're not sure exactly how many people are left inside of the schoolhouse.
00:30:07
Speaker
They have a little bit of telephone contact when county and state police dispatchers are able to get in contact with Roberts. But he just threatens to kill everybody. That's basically what he's been doing since he first saw people and he pulled out his gun, is if they didn't do what he wanted, he was going to kill them. But I think...
00:30:26
Speaker
he overwhelmed himself with maybe his plan here. There are interviews later where most of the girls seem to have recognized what was happening and they were whispering among themselves and talking throughout the ordeal. So there are...
00:30:41
Speaker
Two girls, Marion and Barbara Fisher, 13 and 11. Have you heard about what they did here? i have. So they started argument with Roberts by basically saying, you should shoot us. And the idea, i don't know if they knew what they were doing at the time. It is kind of brilliant. But the idea was, shoot us, that way you're not shooting these other people, and we will...
00:31:07
Speaker
you know, get all of your time and focus on us. I would have to say that I think a better plan in that situation, if they meant it, right? These are young girls, right? school yeah School age girls. If they meant what they were saying, the better plan would be to try and take away his gun. Cause if you're willing to get shot, that's the only risk, right?
00:31:31
Speaker
Right. In trying to fight back. Yeah. Now, the ah but the other part of that is somebody else could get shot. But I would say, because I always wonder, like, because we talk, so especially during this holiday season, talking about all these hostage situations, I always think about, like, what would I do? And, like, I think I would be really scared, but I would immediately fight back. Because you're never going to have more of a surprise on the perpetrator than if you immediately fight back.
00:32:01
Speaker
I think I agree with you, yeah. And so, you know, if they were willing to die anyway, it seems like that would have been a better move, especially since they're thinking it through, right? They're thinking something through based on what they're experiencing. And I'm not actually sure. I'm sure we're going to find out how many girls were left, but that's still that many girls against just one guy. Correct. And so there's still so many of them, like he's only going to be able to focus on one of them at a time. And I'm not trying to knock their plan because they were doing the best they could. But it seems like, you know, if they could divert his attention and everybody else get out or if they like work to, I think it'd be kind of hard to even distinguish like, well, which gun do we take? Or like, what do we do to disarm him? Because there is so much like junk being brought in. Yeah.
00:32:50
Speaker
it It can be a little confusing, but I think that they were well-intentioned. But I guess I doubt anything like this will happen to me. i won't ever be in a one-room schoolhouse, I don't think. And my thought has always been, the second I see a gun, i'm going to do everything I can to disarm that person.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah. Immediately, because otherwise it's too late. And you throw him off balance, just like what happened here, right? he He's off balance because the very first thing that happened was the teacher ran away to go call 911. Well, to be fair, one of the things I read about this guy, and I don't know exactly where I read it, but I read that what he did job-wise was in the overnight hours. Yeah.
00:33:33
Speaker
So he would get home between 3 and 6 in the morning. So he's probably not had a lot of sleep, and that's probably not helping him be you know the best hostage taker that he could possibly be.
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, probably. So if we go to the 911 calls, which have been released by ah number of different articles over the years, they give us a little bit of what's happening and they give us this timeline up to 11 o'clock so that we can understand it better.
00:34:00
Speaker
So there's multiple 911 calls that are made. There's transcripts of... of these released October 10th officially. The known callers, we've got Amos Smoker. So he's the first guy. And then for some reason, we have 911 call from the shooter, the hostage taker.
00:34:18
Speaker
Charles Roberts, and we have a 911 call from his wife, Marie. Now, the local 911 dispatchers were routing these calls so that everyone in this area could, and I assume this is like a jurisdictional issue where they're trying to get the right resources there, because this would be an odd situation for a 911 dispatcher.
00:34:41
Speaker
But they're ultimately trying to make sure that local law enforcement, probably the sheriff, the state patrol, and then whoever is above the state patrol and like dispatching them have as much information as possible.
00:34:55
Speaker
Now, Something happened where we lose some 911 calls, transcripts, because they're transferred outside of the Lancaster County dispatch.
00:35:05
Speaker
Like the ones that are being transferred to the state police, like the information being transferred to state police, it gets lost in all of this. But we know a little bit about the timeline. So 1035 in the morning, Amos Smoker calls 911. It's recorded at 1036 that he is calling on behalf of Emma May Zook, who is telling this crazy story where she's run from this schoolhouse nearby and she's seeking some help.
00:35:29
Speaker
This is the, like... time that it's believed Roberts is releasing the pregnant woman, the parents that have the little kids, and then all of the male students. And it it looks like there's 15 male students in this class at this school, and they're all pushed out at this time.
00:35:50
Speaker
So 1042, we're going to have the first officers on the scene We're going to have the whole thing where somebody's behind the shed. The troopers approach the shed. Roberts is yelling out, like, get out or I'm going to start shooting. And they keep trying to talk to him. he keeps telling them to leave. We have a 1041 call.
00:36:11
Speaker
911 call in the middle of all this. But that call gets transferred over to the state police. And then at 1055, Roberts is probably pretty frustrated by what's happening because he had this plan that he thought was going to happen. And now it's it's getting weird. He started binding these girls near the chalkboard of the front of the classroom. After he's done that, he makes two phone calls.
00:36:38
Speaker
The first is the call to Marie. That's his wife. The next call is he calls 911. And he says that if the state police are not off the property in two seconds, he is going to kill these children.
00:36:53
Speaker
So a dispatcher's job, have you ever called 911, by the way? I have, yeah. is to their Their job as a dispatcher is to gather information And deploy resources. Right. So it's not like they could make that happen.
00:37:09
Speaker
No, but ultimately, they're going to try and keep somebody calm. And ah frequently, that's so they can continue to get the information. Now, the dispatcher here, um according to...
00:37:24
Speaker
ah This BBC News article, fatal shooting at the U.S. s Amish school. They attempt to delay him and transfer the call over to the state police. But when they do that, Roberts hangs up the phone.
00:37:34
Speaker
So that's when the two girls start trying to bargain with him. And I think i think I'm with you on that. like There's other things that could have been done, but at least they were trying something. Right. there were They were kids. I'm not saying they did anything wrong. I i just like to think, like what would I do? I'd probably just stand there and freeze and not be able to do anything.
00:37:52
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So the other call that happens was right at 11 That's Marie Roberts returning home from a Bible study group.
00:38:03
Speaker
She finds a suicide note that her husband has left for her. and she has this brief and very disturbing emotional telephone call with him. And they hang up and both of them call 911. Marie Roberts calls 911. That dispatcher connects her by telephone to the state police. And the same thing is happening to her husband at that time.
00:38:23
Speaker
and what we know about what happens next is actually the shortest part. So we've got these hostages. We've really only had hostages since about 10. It's now 11 or 7
Shooting Aftermath & Victim Stories
00:38:35
Speaker
a.m. m And Charles Carl Roberts, the fourth starts shooting the girls that are bound at the chalkboard. The state troopers immediately descend on what's happening.
00:38:46
Speaker
These bullets go off really quickly. From what they tell us, he fires three shotgun rounds. Now, at least one of those was aimed at the state troopers coming close to the school. He misses.
00:38:59
Speaker
He fires at least 13 rounds from this pistol. He's got one last round that he's going to fire in just a moment. So the state troopers, they're up to the window, and as soon as they get to the window, the shooting stops.
00:39:13
Speaker
And that's because that last 9mm round that Roberts had fired had been into his own head, which for a hostage taking and a killing, this is a remarkably short amount of time. He ends up killing six people.
00:39:30
Speaker
Now, five of them are killed that day. One of them won't die until 2024. And he injures four other people and he kills himself. So this is definitely one of the darker hostage situations. By all We can tell from the evidence made available to the public in this.
00:39:49
Speaker
Apparently this guy had started having some weird thoughts about molesting children that had led him to taking a bunch of little girls hostage, tying them up, and then being unable to follow through. now accordingly, this is something he's said to have done 20 years earlier, but that's denied by the family members that he involves in all of this.
00:40:13
Speaker
um I don't know how I feel about that part. I didn't get the sense of whether it's true or not. and He definitely may have been having some weird fantasies he was having trouble grappling with. It feels to me like this is a situation where That guy was he was in need of some type of involuntary commitment and some serious help. So the police go into the schoolhouse.
00:40:35
Speaker
They start getting these girls out of here immediately. Two of them were dead inside of the schoolhouse. One is dead upon her arrival at the Lancaster General Hospital.
00:40:48
Speaker
Two sisters, they survived until the early hours of October the 3rd. Their life support was ended. And that's not the same two sisters that we were talking about, although one of them is killed, the other is just wounded.
00:41:01
Speaker
The surviving victims all end up at Lancaster General to start with, and they are all stabilized there and then transferred out to different hospitals around Pennsylvania to go to the pediatric trauma and intensive care units.
00:41:18
Speaker
Three kids end up at Penn State Children's Hospital. Four of them go over to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. One ends up going to Christiana Hospital, which is in Delaware, they One child was initially transported to Reading Hospital in Pennsylvania to their medical center by helicopter. And then they were transported back to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
00:41:44
Speaker
Now, according to the reports that we can read, including the Patriot News has this article from the same day. It's called The Amish School Shooting's Angry at God. There's another report from The Washington Post that says five killed at a Pennsylvania Amish school. According to these reports, three of the girls were shot execution style in the back of the head.
00:42:08
Speaker
It says that one of them died in the arms of a state trooper. So I assume it's one of the two who died at the scene. I could be wrong. That could actually be... like one of the girls that dies when she gets to the hospital. The age of the victims range from six to 13. We're going to talk about them in just a second.
00:42:27
Speaker
The police and coroner accounts of the children's wounds differed dramatically. According to Jeffrey Miller that we brought up earlier, that's the Pennsylvania state police commissioner. He said that Robert shot his victims in the head at close range and that he fired 17 to 18 shots in all, which would include the shot,
00:42:44
Speaker
That he used to take his own life. And I think that's now been clarified to be three shotgun blasts, 13 9mm shots. He had one, I assume that's 13 plus one gun. So he has one in the chamber and a 13 round magazine. He uses the last bullet to take his own life as police are coming into this one-room school. The police tell like a much more dramatic, the state troopers, you know, are rushing in as he kills himself type situation. But the state trooper initial report that you can still find on the web archive, it says that as as the state troopers were coming up to look into the windows, the shooting had already stopped.
00:43:26
Speaker
According to Janice Ballinger, she's a deputy coroner for Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2006. She counted at least a dozen shotgun pellet-inflicted wounds in one child.
00:43:37
Speaker
So shotguns are interesting weapons. If you've never fired one, you're not firing a single bullet. You're firing a handful of pellets.
00:43:48
Speaker
They make a mess. Yeah, they make a mess. And according to Janice Ballinger in this Police One article, she's quoted as saying she had to let a colleague take over because she wasn't able to continue. She says that inside the school, there was not one desk, not one chair in the whole school room that was not splattered with either blood or glass. And there were bullet holes outside.
00:44:13
Speaker
every Right, because you know you take a six or seven-year-old and you shoot him with a shotgun, yeah there's not going to be a lot left. No, no, it's going to be ah it's going to be a messy and very tragic scene. and Pennsylvania awards the State Police Medal of Honor to 10 of the troopers at the scene that day, an appreciation for their efforts to assist the victims.
00:44:34
Speaker
um i don't know how I feel. Only they had moved a little faster. um i I try not to criticize that too much. I don't want to either, but I'm just saying we're talking about six little girls, six girls from six to 13 that were murdered. Yeah. And then four girls, eight 13 who were injured. And I just want to point out the six-year-old Rosanna King. So she was removed from life support on October fourth of 2006. Yeah. She had serious brain injuries, but her family said that she could recognize them and frequently smiled, but she never regained the ability to walk, talk, or feed herself. And she succumbed to her injuries at the age of 23 September which was one month shy of the anniversary of the massacre.
00:45:29
Speaker
yeah And if you think about that, that is like prolonged torture. It is. like it That is absolutely... I'm not saying anything else should have happened to Rosanna King. Her family did what they thought was best for her. But what did this accomplish?
00:45:49
Speaker
Nothing. Nothing at all. And this man who i I use that word very loosely. i guess you could call him a male human being because... Yeah, I follow him. What does a Well, there's no like real manly man that's ever going to try and kill 10 little girls. The way that he acted out here, none of it makes any sense. I don't even know why they throw in all the other stuff because is that so supposed to do something? Like, it does that skew it somehow? Because to me, it just, it makes me think that he was just a really messed up person. Yeah. And he had three children. yeah So he didn't do whatever vile fantasy he had in mind. the police disrupted that.
00:46:39
Speaker
It's unfortunate that they didn't get in there faster and they weren't able to stop it. But it was what it was. I mean, we know from the neighbor going over there they didn't necessarily have the best view into the one room schoolhouse to see what was going on.
00:46:55
Speaker
To go back to the two girls that were making a plan, now you have to keep in mind, and some of this comes in the fallout or the aftermath of this hostage taking, the two little, the two young girls that were planning, we're going to have him shoot us so he doesn't shoot them like that type of plan. One of them was killed and one of them survived. Yeah, Marianne Fisher was 13 years old. She dies at the scene. Her sister, Barbara Fisher, is 11. She is wounded.
00:47:27
Speaker
We also lose ah Naomi Rose Aversol. She was 7 years old. She dies at the scene. We have Anna Mae... sttford She's 12 she is declared dead on arrival.
00:47:42
Speaker
So she's the third one that like dies early. as soon as she gets to Lancaster General Hospital, she's dead. Her sister, Sarah M Stolfitz was shot. also 12 years old. I thought maybe they were twins, but I don't know that that's the case. Lena Zook Miller is seven.
00:47:58
Speaker
She dies the following day, October 3rd. Her sister, Mary Miller, she's nine and she dies ah the following day. She was the young girl that was taken up to Newark.
00:48:11
Speaker
Also injured, we have Rachel Soltfus and Then we have Sarah Stoltfus. I don't know how all the Stoltfus family is related because Marian Fisher, her middle name is Stoltfus.
00:48:28
Speaker
ah That's Barbara Fisher's sister. They're probably cousins. but Yeah, I was thinking cousins or siblings. You said Rosanna King, the six-year-old. I believe her sister Esther King is one of the wounded. She was 13. Right, and so it was a small community, and you can, obviously, you notice all of these names, they have, they're similar names, right? Because this was pretty much like one to two steps away, they were related to everybody, right? Yeah.
00:48:58
Speaker
And so it was a small community and they lost like that whole generation. and yeah the whole the whole generation is gone. yeah and And they caused this, it was this trauma.
00:49:11
Speaker
that they all had to endure because of the perpetrator's mental, i I don't know if it was a breakdown or an explosion or what, but he just had it, he had something wrong with
Amish Forgiveness & Community Impact
00:49:26
Speaker
him. I would like to know if he was tested for drugs, but I don't know if that's available anywhere. i didn't see anything like that. I didn't see anything about his mental health or his substance use. And I did, I have interesting questions about both of those things. And I agree with the path you're headed down there.
00:49:43
Speaker
It just makes me wonder, like, how do you go from being, he was, well, he was a tanker, milk tanker, right? But essentially, he was like a milkman, right? a bulk milkman, basically. Okay, and so how does the milkman that's married with three kids show up at the Amish one-room schoolhouse and do this? You know, his wife was at Bible study Yeah. Well, it's weird because you know who the only people to really attend his funeral were? The Amish people?
00:50:15
Speaker
The local Amish folks. They attended his funeral and they set up a fund for his wife and daughters. It's a very interesting way of life that they have because they forgave him. Yep.
00:50:27
Speaker
And yeah that is, guess, I don't know, notable. It is notable. They talk about that. And like, if you, if you go on and read the response, the community had in different places,
00:50:41
Speaker
It's fascinating to me because they believed it was not their responsibility to deal with Roberts. They were just to deal with the survivors and God would take care of Roberts is essentially the view they had.
00:50:53
Speaker
And I guess that's one way to look at it. But I just, I don't know. I have a lot of boiling anger towards middle-aged men who get their panties in a wad one day.
00:51:10
Speaker
and do you really stupid stuff that has impacts on anybody, really. But in this case, it was young girls who they were defenseless. And thinking about, you know, the Amish way of life, those little girls were willing to sacrifice themselves to save the others, right?
00:51:30
Speaker
correct And you've got a guy that's going to take them all out. And it's all for nothing at all. And this is one of the most tragic hostage takings I think that I've ever come upon. And definitely one of the worst for our series here for this year and home for the holidays hostage taking. Yeah, particularly because it's children. i think that's and then it's also a very peaceful culture. And then they're really just at school.
00:51:58
Speaker
They're just in this little tiny school that they go to every day with all their friends and family. Huh. You know, this was hard to even talk about, like, some of it. And that's why I prefaced it by saying, like, I have enjoyed learning about this community ah over the years. They are a very peaceful type of community. And I also...
00:52:16
Speaker
Throughout that, like Witness was a fascinating movie for me. The Amish did not want the type of reminders that potentially could have happened. Ultimately, the school was demolished. It was actually demolished within the week.
00:52:29
Speaker
ah By October 12th, it was gone. And they turned that site into just a quiet pasture. That's a ah quote out of one of the articles from CNN.
00:52:40
Speaker
ah October 13th, they reported that it would just become a little piece of agricultural area. And they they're going to build a new school. They're going to call it the New Hope School. It's nearby, but it's it's in a different location. and it opens...
00:52:54
Speaker
ah six months after the shooting on April 2nd, 2007. And it was very differently styled. Every detail was different from the previous building. It's interesting. Do you think they should have forgiven him that quickly? Well, forgiveness is an interesting thing because, yeah you know, when you forgive somebody, you're doing it for yourself.
00:53:17
Speaker
You're not doing it for the person that you are forgiving. So that should they forgive him that quickly? Well, I mean, i don't know that the timing even really matters because is.
00:53:28
Speaker
It only hurts you, right? Now, granted, i'm the, I can't really, i used to be the type of person, like, it would be highly unlikely that I would forgive this type of behavior in any way, shape, or form. I'd probably just bury it, honestly, because it's just unthinkable.
00:53:47
Speaker
Yeah. All of it's unthinkable. They couldn't do that because it was right in their face every day. They lost a lot of community. They lost like the young girls of their community. And it I don't know. I i want to say like I disagree. Like it's more healthy to have.
00:54:05
Speaker
actual feelings and i would say that if you forgive him it's almost unhuman yeah but that's the way that they live and there is a distinction amish set themselves apart from i don't even know what they call people who aren't amish but we're the worldly community i guess yeah and the other Yeah, the others. And that was the decision that I guess they each made.
00:54:33
Speaker
And also some of the things that were said, they were more from like a community spokesperson. Right. And I do know that it was probably like a healthy thing to do. But at the same time, i don't know. It seems like vengeance is something that has to live in order for bad behavior not to continue. Yeah. Yeah.
00:54:51
Speaker
And I'm just not sure, but I do realize that at that point, because he killed himself, it seems like if they were going to forgive him at any point in time, why not at the beginning, I guess?
00:55:03
Speaker
I don't know. i i feel like this is the type of situation that is so unbearable to think about. i can't even gauge it. But to be 100% honest, if I went through this and I said I forgave him, I'd probably be lying.
00:55:17
Speaker
Well, I just... I decided... Kind of while researching this, that it's none of my business what the Amish do. I did see where they got a lot of criticism online for forgiving him. um And i I think there's something to be said for the acknowledgement of evil having to occur in order for us to understand like and not repeat certain things.
Cultural Impact & Media Portrayal
00:55:40
Speaker
But... I'm not in these people's position. They're having to rebuild a community. And I think that they're doing it the only way they know how. Well, right. And it's not like holding onto it can change anything. Right. Right. And maybe they're just like much, much wiser than we are. There's something about the senselessness of this entire situation And I always want to know, like, why, right? I want to, like, dig deep into it and, like, why did this happen? I don't think anything that occurred, like, that actually occurred, i don't think any of that was the plan.
00:56:20
Speaker
i think it all went to hell really fast. And he just, he was enraged, and that's why he murdered all those girls. Yeah. Yeah, somehow this ends up being a Lifetime movie, which is so weird to me. It's called Amish Grace.
00:56:36
Speaker
it's and It's based on a book. The book is available to read. And apparently it was a very popular Lifetime movie. And I just cannot wrap my head around how this is a lifetime movie without like major plot changes. But ultimately looking at this, I find it to be one of the most unexplored of the hostage shakings that we have looked at. And I know there's a lifetime movie, but that's not really what I'm talking about when I'm talking about
00:57:09
Speaker
exploration. There is something so disconnecting and jarring about going into such a calm and peaceful community and taking 10 little girls. Like what, what is the plan when you do that? How are you going to control these children? You know, obviously you've brought guns, but So you knew that was a potential outcome.
00:57:34
Speaker
There's just something so disturbing and disconnected about this story. i kind of apologize to people for dropping this in the middle of a holiday hostage shaking. like It's pretty bad, yeah.
00:57:45
Speaker
it's It is a very I thought it was a very unique type hostage taking, which I then immediately contradicted myself by pointing out that the week before there was one that was very similar. it was difficult to read about It it was interesting.
00:58:00
Speaker
But this is certainly one of those things that I think one of the reasons we don't get more about it is because it's ultimately...
00:58:11
Speaker
about the Amish community and they don't want the attention that would come with much more than what they've had here. Right. And not to mention, so this is one of those situations where you've got one person, if he had made a different decision in that day, this doesn't happen. Right. And that's a weird concept, except not really, because if you ever have anything traumatic or something that like really changes your life happen to you, a lot of people think through how they got there, right?
00:58:43
Speaker
Right. and how if he had just done this or that or the other, you leading up to something unexpected happening, that none of it would have happened. And in this situation, you've got this guy, this one dude who he decides he's going to do something, which again, i don't feel like is what ended up happening, but he decides he's got a bug up his butt and he is going to go and take this schoolhouse full of people, little kids and some adults hostage.
00:59:16
Speaker
And he did it. And so him deciding not to do that changes everything. And maybe that's what he was aiming for, even though it didn't turn out the way he wanted. Maybe he just wanted to have power and control over the final moments of some little girl's lives because maybe he thought that would make him feel manly.
00:59:37
Speaker
Or maybe he immediately regretted it and didn't want to face the consequences of his actions, so he killed himself. This guy was a coward, regardless. oh yeah Nothing about what he did.
00:59:48
Speaker
it didn't He could have just as easily just shot himself in a field, and it it would have actually been better than taking out the potential of these six little girls' lives and inflicting the trauma that he did on everybody else, the four that were injured and all the rest of the people that experienced it. Yeah. Well, I don't have a lot more on this. This is a rabbit hole. I will caution people that going down this rabbit hole is kind of depressing.
01:00:16
Speaker
It does have enlightening moments related to the culture and the place and the people. But like this story, this particular story itself is one of those that like, it is very difficult to wrap your head around all. We're getting closer to wrapping up the hostage taking
Episode Conclusion
01:00:31
Speaker
series. I do find myself like reading this and going, you know,
01:00:36
Speaker
Something like this can only be learned from. There's like no way to analyze it without the presence of the person who perpetrated it. Right. And he lived a completely different life than what nobody saw this side of him, I don't think.
01:00:51
Speaker
no
01:01:02
Speaker
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01:01:14
Speaker
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01:03:18
Speaker
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01:03:36
Speaker
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